Zaine (Verian Mates) (A Sci Fi Alien Abduction Romance)

by Stella Sky

  I cringed inwardly. He would never be able to figure out the code to the room. Then I would be stuck with him, and it would only be a matter of moments before he found me. Trapped with my enemy. I swallowed and tilted my head to the left to try and catch a glimpse of what he was doing.

  He tried to open the door twice with a passcode before violently pounding his fists against the door and letting out an enraged roar.

  I shook from behind the pod and knew I either had to find a way to open the door or confront him. The latter didn’t seem like an ideal choice, so I crawled behind the row of pods, quietly, slowly approaching the keypad.

  He whipped around the room wildly, letting out an aggravated cry every so often as he busied himself with the central computer that connected all the pods. I used his cries as opportunities to shuffle a little faster without being heard. Then, suddenly, he was silent again. I peeked out from above on of the pods and ducked immediately as I caught sight of him in the blue glow of the glowstone.

  I’d reached the door but felt too afraid to make my move. I could feel my body shaking violently within, but as I held my hand out in front of me, it was steady as ever. I pressed my eyes shut for just a moment before checking on the dragon again. He simply stood at the mainframe with his hand on the screen below him, not moving or attempting to unlock the pods.

  With a breath, I raised to my feet and input the code for the door. With a click press of the enter button, I fell back to my knees and scrambled behind the metal beds as the doors shot open. Rerdig turned quickly, and his whole body seemed to shift the room.

  He raced to the door and into the hallway, stopping only once to turn back around and inspect the cryo room from the hallway. I pressed my face to the floor and tried to get as small as possible as his gaze passed over the room.

  The moment seemed to linger on forever before he finally turned on his heel and stomped down the hall and out of earshot.

  He’d escaped.

  I crouched in the fetal position and cupped my hands over my mouth as I let out a stifled cry, scarce tears falling down my face before I inhaled sharply and willed them away.

  I had two choices: stay and pray or leave the room and find a weapon. Find Haden.

  Several minutes passed, and the doors had already locked shut again. I found the strength to crawl across the floor once more, and soon I reached the doors. I pressed my back up against the wall and raised my legs slowly until I was standing next to the opening.

  I input the code once more, and the doors slid open with an audible click. I waited, listened for footsteps or the sounds of breath or commotion. I heard nothing and took it as my cue to slip out into the halls.

  The bright white lights made me feel even more vulnerable than I already had as I tiptoed along the hallways into the main vestibule. The ships reception area was the main hub for each section of the shuttle. From here, the room branched off to the main elevators, control room, and stateroom corridors. With any luck, I would be able to find Haden there.

  I shifted around the U-shaped desk and crouched behind its shelves, making myself as low to the ground as humanly possible. Footsteps could be heard running through the corridors up ahead leading into the control room, and then they went disturbingly quiet. The lights in the ship suddenly went down, causing the whole carrier to be lit up only by emergency lights in the ground that gave off a warm white hue and very little visibility.

  The ship was suddenly ablaze with shifter energy. I looked down into the hall adjacent to me, and my body tingled with fear. My eyes widened as far as they could as my pupils tried to adjust to the darkness.

  I scraped my top teeth against my bottom lip, and my eyes darted around in suspense. Find Haden. It was the only thought that ran through my mind. I jumped in surprise and crouched even lower as the orange shifter charged through the room, striding with confidence through the office to get to the corridor behind me. I willed myself to stay quiet and tried to think where weapons were kept.

  Then suddenly I felt a hauntingly familiar hum of energy. I’d felt it only twice before. Once when I was making love to Haden, and the other time when shifters invaded the offices at Riddell, coming to demand answers from Zaphira about an incident that had happened years prior regarding a match gone missing.

  The ship seemed to beam with their force, and as I heard footsteps coming down the hall, I took off running.

  I made my way into the cargo room and found myself stumbling through the shelving units. My hands trembled along the flat tops of the shelving, looking for anything I might be able to use to slow his progress. I could still hear commotion back in the hall. I was sure my genius idea to run hadn’t exactly put me in first as the master of stealthy maneuvers. Still, I hoped I would have at least a little time before he found me again, if at all.

  This was too much to hope for, it seemed, as the small shifter entered the room. My eyes widened, and I crouched down once more in the corner of the room where the light hit the least.

  Different colored shifters, I’d read, had different specialties. Red dragons were often the only ones left to breathe fire, white dragons had the largest wings, black dragons had incredible strength, and yellow dragons had incredible night vision.

  I was glad he wasn’t a yellow dragon.

  I tried to think back to what orange dragons were good at, but the only word that entered into my mind was betrayal. I watched him carefully, my eyes wide in the blackness, and felt behind me to a tin gun cache that had been stored in case of an emergency. I figured if there were any time to use it, it would be now.

  I steadied my hand as the dragon whipped blindly through the room, throwing storage boxes out of his way and feeling around the shelving units.

  “Where are you?” he seethed through his clenched jaw.

  I rolled my eyes inwardly. Yeah, like I was going to volunteer myself for that one. I reached behind me and began to unlatch the gun case. I knew the code to unlock the cache and instinctively put it in. I cringed at the difficulty of feeling for the numbers backward; my back pressed hard against the case.

  The gun case opened with a quiet snap, and I quickly moved my hand over the lid to prevent any further noises. Rerdig froze in his tracks and delved deeper into the cargo room. There were fifteen rows of shelves that took up a good portion of the hull. I backed up with my laser pistol in hand and began to crawl toward the north end of the room to try and made my way back toward the door.

  “I want to talk to you,” came the dragon’s offer. His tone seemed calmer now. “I know you’re in here and I’m tired of playing cat and mouse. Come out, and I will talk to you the way I wanted to back in my cell, without your traitor around.”

  Traitor? Was he talking about Haden? I licked my lip and dashed for the door. He reeled backward and walked toward me.

  I swallowed hard and raised the weapon in front of me as I slowly crawled backward out of the room.

  “You and I have more in common than you think,” he said with a warning in his tone. “Sarra, please. You know firing a weapon at me could only endanger the ship.”

  He was right, but at this point, I didn’t care. He was a rebel intent on overthrowing a government that was in my alliance. I sincerely doubted all he wanted to do was talk with me. I envisioned myself becoming his hostage. Suddenly that pride I had hoped Zaphira would have in me would be stained with disappointment for getting into such a ridiculous situation in the first place.

  I held my breath as I raised to my feet in the darkened hallway. I watched his silhouette in the cargo room for just a moment, studying whether or not he could see me before turning and running down the hall.

  I felt hard footsteps come up behind me with full force and I fell to the ground, crawling for an air duct and forcing my body into it. I watched as the tube closed in front of me and reopened as Rerdig walked past; his half-formed body looking more dragon than ever. Orange scales were made to look yellow in the glow of the lights, and he stopped cold in front of the ve
nt I was hiding in. He turned around briefly, and I could almost see the annoyance in his eye.

  My body shook against the metal behind me, and I grabbed my arms, willing them to stop trembling. Rerdig seemed to hear it too as he spun around slowly and began to scrape his fingers down the walls next to him, slowly walking to the end of the corridor and out of sight.

  I thought I was in the clear as he continued down the hall, but my heart stopped as his tail still lingered behind; swaying from side to side and moving up into the vent; touching my leg.

  The dragon stopped cold and flung around at speeds so intense that the ship shook under his weight. He knelt down in front of the grate, and suddenly the rage that had overtaken him had grown calm. He reached his arm into the grate with fury, and I aimed the laser at him with shaking hands, tightly closing my eyes, and he ripped my body from the vent.

  “There now,” he said with a satisfactory tone. He put his hand around my neck and lifted me with one arm until I was high in the air. He spread his wings victoriously and gave a laugh as he inspected me.

  “I know who your mother is,” I spat out furiously, grabbing his hand and desperately pulling them away from my throat.

  He raised a quick brow to me and smirked. “So do I.”

  I coughed against his grip and flailed my legs wildly at him, kicking him in the stomach over and over until he set me back on the ground, his hand still firmly around my neck.

  “I know who your choosing is,” he mirrored my tone.

  I pressed my feet into the ground and felt somehow surprised to feel the floor beneath me. I looked up at him with my brows drawing to a furrow. “Yes,” I managed to breathe out. “You met him in the jail.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “I met him in the rebellion.”

  Chapter Ten

  Haden

  I raised a brow and curled my lips slightly; my eyes were the color of ice: blue and clear and thoughtful. I felt as though I had seen nothing but sadness in the time spent away from my new union.

  We overtook the shuttle and were on a course back to Udora. We were docking in the old ruins of any day now, and I still wasn’t sure what to say to my beautiful love. I’d heard Sarra roaming the halls at night and hoped she would come to me, but she never did.

  She hadn’t spoken to me since Rerdig told her the truth about me, but I’d made sure she was kept comfortable since then. She was allowed to freely roam the halls, and she was instructed to make a call to Riddell and make up any excuse why we weren’t already on Earth.

  As for me, I’d spent most of my time in the captain’s quarters. I instructed Eddrys to tell Sarra she could come to me with any questions she had, but still I hadn’t caught sight of her.

  “Why don’t you just explain it to her?” came the inquisitive tones of the green dragon I had come to know as my dear friend. Eddrys used a careful tone as he monitored me and then gave a frustrated shrug. For a shifter in the midst of a rebellion, he sure hated drama.

  “Do you think she’d understand?” My voice hit the air suddenly, my frustrated tones saturating it.

  Eddrys paused and gave it a moment of thought before concluding, “She’d try.” He shrugged again. “She loves you, Haden. Everyone can see it. And come on, surely we can’t be the only people who hate how the alliance is shaped.”

  “She’s part of the alliance,” I argued with a roll of my eyes. “And she’s furious, no doubt.”

  “Well… yeah,” he agreed. “You could have told Rerdig to take it a little easier on the whole ‘finding her’ thing. His mission to restrain her almost got this ship taken down by a laser pistol.”

  “Yeah, well, silly me for thinking she was unarmed.”

  Eddrys stared at me incredulously and raised both his brows as he enunciated, “Yeah. That was a pretty stupid move. Besides, why did you have to get her all scooped up anyway? I thought you said she was sympathetic to the rebellion?”

  “No, I told you she was curious about it. It’s a vast difference.”

  “Well then, might I suggest talking to the girl instead of sitting in here moping about it?”

  I closed my eyes and rested my hand on the counter before me, taking it off and on three times, feeling the coolness against my palm. “Look, I thought I could break her, get her on our side, but it didn’t work. Now I’m supposed to divulge even more information to her?” I sighed with frustration as I heard my word. “I lost her, Eddrys. That much is clear, and I don’t want to keep reliving it.”

  “Understandable,” he said, “but you don’t just seem unwilling to share, or even try. Now I don’t know the girl like you do, but she really cares about you; ridiculously so. Guess I just thought you guys were in love or somethin’.”

  I stared down at the table before me and grabbed a berry out of the large dish of fruit on the counter. I held it between my fingers and inspected it before dropping it unceremoniously back into the basket. “Is it possible for two people to change so much in such a short time? Or are we destined to remain two different people and it just took coming here to make us see it?”

  “Haden,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “There are two things I’ve learned in life.”

  “Just two?” I teased.

  “Hey, it’s been a slow winter.” He shrugged. “One is about you, and one is about, well, women.”

  “Petra’s really teaching you a lot.”

  “Please,” he said with a wave of dismissal. “Even saying her name fills me with dread. Trust me, you’re lucky to have picked one of the good ones. Now shut up and listen to me.”

  “Right, go.”

  “One. You are terrible about letting things go, so stop acting like all is doomed and start trying. Two, the thing about women… The thing they really love is an apology. You get where I’m going with this?”

  “I want her,” I admitted. “I just don’t know what to do or say to get her to stay with me.”

  “Apologize to her,” he enunciated.

  I took a deep breath and stood from the table. “Alright,” I sighed.

  I walked the halls of the shuttle and scraped my teeth over my lip repeatedly as I made my way to Sarra’s room. I had made my argument in my head nearly a hundred times before I found myself standing in front of her door. The walls in the hall were all metal, and her door was no different.

  It was a sliding door that interlocked with a passcode from within, just like the rest of the doors on the ship. Part of me hated the design. I was always afraid of getting my wings clipped in the hinges or having it close on me before I was fully through.

  I swallowed hard and relived my argument in my head. I hadn’t really pretended to be someone else, I kept thinking. In fact, if anything, I had shown my own sympathies toward the rebellion and my disappointment in the Koth alliance pretty clearly. Hadn’t I? She was a reporter in a past life, wasn’t she? This should have been obvious to her.

  Yet, I knew all of my arguments would fall to dust the moment I saw those green eyes.

  With a breath, I knocked on her door and quietly announced, “It’s me.”

  Without even a moment’s hesitation, the door opened. I stepped in and found her pacing the room. She continued to do so, never making eye-contact with me before stopping in front of the mirror. Her hair was down and slightly greasy from the events of days passed. Her makeup was hastily washed off, leaving a smudge of powdery charcoal underneath her eyes. She smiled at the sight and ran her hands through her hair before turning to me with a mixture of shock and fury.

  I could always tell a woman was really mad by the way she smiled.

  “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

  “Mm,” she mumbled in response, barely uttering a word at all. Her eyes were lost in the distance again, unwilling to relent from their firm, fixated stare.

  “So you’re still here,” I said quietly. There was an annoyance in my tone that bordered on indifference as I reached my arm to the door frame and said, “I would have guessed you would have left by
now.”

  She stared down at her hands and then fussed with the white shirt on the chair that sat near the bed. She folded the material and pressed her hand over the design that sat on the side of the shirt. She pulled the fabric to her chest and continued to shake her head as she said, “Space still causes spontaneous combustion, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  Her eyes shot open, and she nodded toward the window; it showed open space and stars as far as the eye could see. “Humans plus space usually equals death.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “So you want to leave?”

  She looked up at me with lost eyes that sent a pain running down through my legs. She kept careful control of her emotions as she finally focused her eyes on me. My anticipation of her words made me sick. Every breath she began had me on edge.

  “I guess I couldn’t blame you if you did,” I offered softly, making my way closer to her. “But I never lied to you.”

  Her brows shot up her forehead and lowered as quickly as they rose. She must have wanted to call me a hypocrite, but she didn’t. She just stared; willed me to make my case to her. “Huh,” I said with surprise as I moved my hand across my arm. “I think I was expecting more, uh, yelling than this. Some provocative words that should make me want to change my ways or… screaming or… you telling me that I hurt you.”

  “You hurt me,” she articulated through a set jaw, her green eyes piercing into me.

  “I understand that this isn’t ideal, but it’s why we both came here, isn’t it?” I laughed softly, searching for an answer in her expression. “We both came to find something. To change something.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “That’s not why I came.”

  With a raise of my brow, I barely whispered, “Oh?”

  She looked me over and said nothing. I could see the bruises around her neck and felt a fire of fury well up in my soul. Rerdig was definitely going to hear it for this one.

  “I think I’d prefer the yelling,” I teased, but my love made no contact with me. It seemed Sarra was changing once more. As her new confidant, I didn’t know where I fit anymore; I didn’t know if we’d created a strong enough bond to get through this. I hated her for that, for not believing. As I watched her by the window, I realized we both felt paralyzed with fear. We loved one another too much to leave and hated the other side too much to lend out support.